For 75 hours, Avadesh Kumar and Anita Devi waited beside an open drain in Delhi’s Jasola, through rain and sun, hunger and thirst, hoping against hope that rescuers would pull out their son Mithun alive.
Gupta on Tuesday announced ₹ 5 lakh as financial aid for his family. They rushed to the drain within 15 minutes and informed the police. Mithun fell into the drain that flows metres away from their rented single-room accommodation in a packed lane in Jasola village. The family’s home in Jasola village is lined by two drain sluices that flow towards Shaheen Bagh Metro station. The neighbourhood itself is sandwiched between the Okhla sewage treatment plant on the west and the Shaheen Bagh drain on the east. The rickety homes, mostly one or two storeys tall, are stacked in tight rows, with little space between them. In the narrow lanes these houses are built on, layers of trash and waste hide the streets from view. The inescapable smell of sewage rends the air. A five-year-old boy saw Mithun fall into the drain and alerted the neighbours, who in turn called Mithun’s parents. Then, some officers from the Sarita Vihar police station and two fire tenders arrived and began the search and rescue – a torturous process that stretched over three days that would test the family’s resolve and eventually break it. In that time, Devi and Kumar ate little. “How could we think about food and water when our son’s life was at stake? “The authorities wake up only when any tragedy falls and someone loses their life. There are two drains in our neighbourhood but both are open and do not have even boundary walls. desilting and release of toxic gases, there are no specific rules regarding proper barricading or installing grills to prevent people from falling in While the National Green Tribunal (NGT) has reiterated that drains are not covered to allow for regular cleaning.
“We lost our son due to the government’s apathy towards the basic safety and security compromises poor people like us face every day,” said 34-year-old Devi, who works as a domestic help in the neighbourhood. On Monday, a junior engineer of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) was suspended after chief minister Rekha Gupta expressed “strong displeasure and deep sorrow” over the incident. People have drowned in the drain earlier,” said Mohammad Riyaz, a resident.
The family and some local residents even protested against the alleged inaction on Sunday. For the family, from Badaun in Uttar Pradesh, the ordeal started around 11am on Saturday. I had one samosa in the morning today (Tuesday), and a bowl of rice and daal on Monday. On Sunday also, all my family members survived on samosas that our relatives and neighbours forced us to eat,” said Kumar. The last rites are likely to take place on Wednesday, after the autopsy is completed at the mortuary of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). On Monday, the civic agencies removed garbage from multiple points between the spot where the boy fell and the place where his body was eventually recovered.
